Quotable

One question facing Republican presidential candidate Jeb BUsh is whether he would, as president, allow U.S. government agencies to continue to withhold 3,600 JFK assassination records from public view after their scheduled release in October 2017.

One reader thinks President Jeb Bush would decide in favor of JFK secrecy. He calls attention to what Jeb’s father said on the issue, particularly George H.W. Bush’s signing statement attached to the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Act.

“Should have phoney 201 in RI [Records Integration] to backstop this, all documents therein forged & backdated. Should look like a CE file …. Cover: planning should include provision for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow.”

“…The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it….And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment….”

President John F. Kennedy’s speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City, April 27, 1961

Best known as the nerdy-looking frontman for pop rock act Bleachers,Jack Antonoff is much too thoughtful to be a pop music celebrity. . Though he broke into the mainstream as the guitarist for Fun, Antonoff also wrote a hit song “Brave” with Sara Bareilles, and wrote and produced three tracks from Taylor Swift’s latest record.

Former CIA analyst Brian Latell thinks Fidel Castro was behind JFK’s assassination, a self-serving theory for a former employee of an agency that conspired to assassinate Fidle Castro 634 times. His is one of many JFK conspiracy theories which I doubt. Latell also thinks Fide Castro is a hypocritical dictator, which I can believe.

“First of all, nobody ever goes that way for a visa. Second, it costs money to go that distance. He (Oswald) stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him, headed out saying ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this.’…..What is your government doing to catch the other assassins? It took about three people.”

“Now, in the seconds that I talked just now, a flurry of shells come into the car”.

– Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, who rode in the front of the Presidential limousine during JFK’s assassination, describing what the Warren Commission would later describe as a single shot. (Read Kellermans’ testimony here.)

“If the CIA did find out what we were doing [talks toward normalizing relations with Cuba], this would have trickled down to the lower echelon of activists, and Cuban exiles, and the more gung-ho CIA people who had been involved since the Bay of Pigs…. Read more

“The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinions without the discomfort of thought.”

“I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long-run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up.”

“I have read the Warren Commission Report in its entirety and dozens of other books as well, I am sorry to say the only thing I am absolutely sure of today is that at least two of the shots fired that day in Dealey Plaza came from behind where I stood on the knoll, not from the book depository.”

–Cheryl McKinnon,a journalism major who witnessed the assassination of President Kennedy. McKinnon went on to become a newspaper reporter for the San Diego Star News. Read more